Matters of Care in Designing a Feminist Coalition

Recent literature on Participatory Design describes the act of designing coalitions around a matter of concern. This paper challenges the notion of concern as the ontological basis of coalitions. Coalitions are, in fact, political organizational forms that have a long history in civil rights movements, characterized by the provisional union of different oppressed groups in times of intense repression. According to feminist literature, what unites people in feminist coalitions are matters of care and not matters of concern. Following this shift of perspective, this research critically revises the notion of designing coalitions while analysing a codesign project for increasing women coffee workers' visibility in a particular region of Latin America.